You can find really awesome ClickBank products just after their release and start to promote them before other affiliates. You’ll get very important advantages:

• Your content will be ranked higher in search engines because of its earlier appearance
• You can occupy direct linking ads in Google AdWords and other PPC advertising systems.

How can you find new ClickBank products?

1. Use Analysis -> New Products to find ClickBank products that were added to the ClickBank Marketplace on its last update. Here you can choose a ClickBank category on the right sidebar to filter new products by categories.

2. If you’ve missed new products for the previous days, you can use The Advanced ClickBank Search and specify the "Release date" option.

Needless to say, not every new ClickBank product should be promoted. You have to check sales page of a new product (even with zero gravity):

• Does it have a good design?
• Is sales pitch well written?
• Would you buy this product?
• Isn’t it a rip-off?

Ideally, you should try the product yourself. And if it has a good value, you can start to promote it.

And there is one more important point. Sometimes newly added products with zero gravity are not ready to be sold. In this case you should not risk. You’d better ask the vendor whether his/her product is prepared.

It is interesting to discover why some ClickBank vendors become successful while others fail. One reason lies in a person’s greediness. It is a huge mistake when a new vendor doesn’t consider affiliates to be a powerful source of wealth. And such vendor sets a small %/sale value.

Let’s look on the distribution of %/sale among top 100 ClickBank vendors:

You won’t find here any vendor with %/sale less than 50%!!!
The average %/sale among top 100 ClickBank vendors is 68,01%.
The most popular values of %/sale here are:

• 75% (56 times)
• 65% (15 times)
• 50% (14 times)

It is much easier to promote products with a big %/sale, especially if an affiliate uses paid sources of traffic.

That’s why, if you are a vendor, you should set a high %/sale value.

There are thousands of ClickBank products to promote in the ClickBank Marketplace. Which product should you choose? Which will convert well? Today I will give you some advice on how to select a product or a whole niche of products. Use this information to increase your chance of success.

1. Find a product that treats an urgent problem or solves a problem which is painful for customers. For example, a treatment for some painful illness, an effective solution for some uncomfortable condition (like a fat body, weak muscles or even bad performance in some sport) or highly secretive information in some area of interest.

When a customer comes to a sales page for the first time, it’s very desirable that he/she buys the product. Needless to say that if the person doesn’t buy a product the first time he/she most likely will never buy.

Check the sales page for the product you want to promote. Does it solve a painful problem and is the solution is urgent?

2. The solution you are promoting has to have enough search volume. Make a keyword search before you decide to promote a product. Do terms related to the product have enough search volume? You can use Google AdWords Keyword tool to do your research. Type in some keywords you associate with the product and this tool will give you information about search volumes and will provide you with many other related keywords you can use. There should be enough searches, look for keywords with at least 1000 monthly searches.

If the product doesn’t have enough audience interest, it will be very hard to promote.

This also reflects to a niche selection; focus only on the niches that have traffic.

3. The keywords you choose should not have too many Google results. Try to find keywords with a huge search volume but with a low amount of Google results. For example, keyword "tinnitus treatment" has about 1,530,000 results:

Look for keywords with at least 1,000 monthly searches and less than 500,000 Google results. This will increase chances that your content (landing pages, reviews, etc.) will be visible in search engines.

4. If a product solves one-time urgent problem: try to find similar products. If there are lots of other options, neglect the product (you should rather concentrate your time on promoting another product in another niche). If chosen product doesn’t have many analogues, and it beats them with ease by its efficiency or "beautiful wrapping", it will be a good one to promote.

5. Promoting a niche. If you want to promote a niche, you should look for a niche with many products. Firstly find lots of options that you can offer to your customers. Secondly create an email subscription list on your niche’s topic. Give valuable content to your subscribers (explanations, tips, videos, etc.). Then indirectly make recommendations of chosen products.

I hope you find these tips useful! Please, leave your opinion or suggestions in comments below.

Update 2009-07-24
Wow! Today Matthew Carter showed me a hidden page on the ClickBank website that decodes HopLinks: http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_decoding.htm
I hope it will stay there for a long time

A standard ClickBank HopLink has the next format:
http://affiliateID.vendorID.hop.clickbank.net/

You can easily create such HopLink if you know a vendor’s ID.

But, in April 2009 ClickBank announced ClickBank HopLink Shield. It produces an encoded version of HopLink that has no vendor ID in it. Since May 2009, it is only possible to create encoded HopLinks on the ClickBank website. However, you still may create unencoded HopLinks as specified above.

As stated on the ClickBank website:
"* Please note that all older formats of HopLinks are still valid and will continue to be tracked."

Why did people at ClickBank have decided to encode HopLinks?

The most common reason is to secure affiliates from their commissions to be stolen.

When another affiliate or even a customer (it is easy to create a ClickBank account) sees unencoded HopLink, he knows which vendor is being promoted and can buy through his own HopLink. In this case, the initial affiliate won’t receive the commission.

But if the initial affiliate used the encoded HopLink, it would be harder (however, still possible) to "stole" his commission.

Until ClickBank HopLink Shield was implemented, smart affiliates used another services to cloak their HopLinks. So, it is good that ClickBank has created its own:

• ClickBank HopLink Shield is free
• You don’t have to worry about your links’ expiration and uptime

How to create an encoded HopLink with CBGraph?

Step 1. Find a vendor.
Step 2. Click on the link "shield" near to the ClickBank ID.

Step 3. Specify your ClickBank Nickname and optionally some Tracking ID, click on the "Create" button.

Step 4. And you will get your encoded HopLink.

The field "Tracking ID" is optional. But you should fill it if you want to track the sources of your sales. You don’t have to create different HopLinks for many Tracking IDs. Create only one HopLink and you can replace "?tid=" part in it as many times as you wish.

It is the end of my review of ClickBank HopLink Shield. I strongly recommend you to use it to encode your HopLinks.